This blog by Martin Belam sums up the situation faced by many community managers, many of the people writing comments are not engaging their brains. It’s a very amusing read which will strike a chord with anyone who has been moderating online communities. I have been moderating and banning for 15 years and it never ceases to amaze me what people think is reasonable. I’m also amused when people criticise other people’s spelling and grammar when their own is far from perfect.

Context to the Tweet or be sacked comments from Peter Horrocks and Raju Narisetti. Journalists should tweet but need to understand how it can work to help them, as well as drive traffic to their sites. It’s all about the conversation and interaction.

25/05/2011

It is always important to remember social media is a tool, beware of perceptions and be professional.
Bringing an element of yourself in is okay, particularly if it is your own stream. However, I have seen Twitter accounts for brands used for personal chats, and I don't think that's right.

Examples of how Facebook has been used by the New York Times to engage with its audience.
Mashable has also listed eight great ways to use Facebook for any brand.
I always believe in being as human as possible and trying to avoid feeds. It's a delicate balance though.

This is an interesting development from the New York Times as its editors will be Tweeting directly rather than using RSS feeds.
Tweeting as a human being is a brilliant thing, and it is important to interact with your readers. However, this is a labour intensive job.
I started out Tweeting as a human for the newspaper I used to work for three years ago. However, there wasn't anyone to do it when I was on holiday. They all thought I was nuts (they're all on Twitter now).
Small news teams need to a certain level of automation alongside the human voice.

16/05/2011

Mindy McAdams writes a great deal of common sense here about using social media as a journalist.
For professional purposes I use Facebook as a page, it keeps things simple and protects my personal account with its high security settings.

Neal Mann puts a strong case forward as to why journalists should be using social media. There are still people who resist, but it's not just a broadcasting tool, it's a way to find stories, interact with other professionals and learn a great deal.

15/05/2011

Curiosity led me to the Sunday Times Social List after spotting a few #stsl tweets and reading this blog by Adam Tinworth. I don’t consider myself influential, I share the occasional opinion and find other people far more interesting, but put myself on the list anyway for a laugh.

This will be my highest rank ever:

Bet I won't be a 'tycoon' for long

In some ways this is a bit like Word Nerd, the Times game to show how clever you are. It was fun for about half an hour and a great piece of promotion.

At Journalism.co.uk we created a top 100 most influential journalists in the UK, in early May. We seeded the list with 50 people and then threw it out to the crowd. There are journalists missing from this list, but the people on it were nominated by their peers, and then ranked according to PeerIndex‘s algorithms.

Personally I don’t think there is a definitive list. There are people who are useful and interesting to you, and they are the most important.

12/05/2011

Mary's article shows how the Norwich Evening News promoted its readers' poll on Twitter by being interesting and engaging.

It is important to have a person behind a feed to give a publication a human voice and show you are listening as well as broadcasting.

I still support the use of feeds though, as it is labour intensive to post every story up individually. I started using feeds for the newspapers I used to work on back in 2008, because there was no one to post when I was on holiday. It kept a new service alive.

Malcolm Coles took a closer look at Twitter referrals to newspaper sites last year. Today the Pew report showing Twitter doesn't send through as much traffic as say, Facebook, has been HUGE, with a great deal of response and retweeting.

05/05/2011

This week we have been putting together a list of influential journalists in the UK on Twitter, at Journalism.co.uk. It has taken off on the web #j100 and resulted in extensive discussion in the office. This article shows how the most followed doesn't mean the most influential.

The tag maybe related to a journalism or social media conference I’m interested in, or a trending topic, it changes.

Yesterday (Friday, November 27) there was a great deal of activity on the #demo2010 tag as students started occupying more universities, and tweets were full of pictures and videos from demonstrations on Wednesday, November 24.

After updating colleagues on which of their old unis were taken over by students one asked me: “How do you know this stuff and find it on Twitter?”

Then I explained how I followed the hashtag. It’s a simple way to find everything posted on a particular theme, topic or event.

Former digital content and social media editor for six newspaper websites in West Sussex.
Experienced journalist and sub-editor.
Seeker of knowledge and general internet enthusiast.
My opinions are my own.